Classic Fiction

In his latest adventure, Bruno, France's favourite country cop, investigates a long-buried war crime and faces a devastating flood that threatens the town he polices and the people he loves. 'French tourism should raise a glass to Walker's Dordogne mysteries' – Daily Mail Bruno's archaeologist friend, Clothilde, asks him to help Abby, an American woman who wants to settle in...

The Famous Five - Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy - have been delighting readers for over 70 years. After the Five see a boy being kidnapped at the beach, they set out to find him. But where have the kidnappers hidden the boy? Will Timmy lead them to the answer? Famous Five Colour Short Stories: Good Old Timmy is...

Rediscover Puffin Classics - the world's favourite stories. Peter Pan and Tinker Bell lead the three Darling children over the rooftops of London and away to Neverland - the island where the lost boys play. Magic and mischief are in the air, but if villainous Captain Hook has his way, before long, someone will be swimming with the crocodiles...

A collection of brilliant short stories from one of America's greatest ever science fiction writers. Often considered to be Robert Sheckley's best short story collection, Untouched By Human Hands displays all of the author's signature surreal humour and eye for the unreal. Featuring human space exploration from the perspective of appalled aliens, darkly comic dystopias, and wry fables of technological...

In a rigid, repressive society, a young woman discovers dark powers within herself with terrifying, far-reaching consequences. The Handmaid's Tale meets The Village in this stunningly original feminist debut. Shortlisted for the GoodReads Choice Awards 2020 for Best Debut Novel and Best Horror Novel. 'A magnificent, raw slice of folk horror, dark with threat and clenched with suspense... a brilliant...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry with collectable new covers features Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archive material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. As far as children are concerned, a REAL WITCH is easily the most dangerous of all the living creatures on Earth. This beautiful edition of The Witches, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,...

When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy: an unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape...

A young woman claims the throne of a realm inspired by Filipino mythology in this YA romantic fantasy, the first in an enchanting new duet by #1 New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz. MJ Rodriguez has spent her life hiding in the human world and guarding a heavy secret. She is half-encanto, a fairy from a hidden...

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital, there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realises that he is the only person who can see — everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. A stunning new clothbound edition of one of the most famous science-fiction novels of the...

A much-loved classic from a giant of European science fiction. Stanislaw Lem is perhaps the most original and influential European science fiction writer of the twentieth century. His ornate, phantasmagorical writing probes the furthest reaches of the universe while remaining deeply and particularly human. The Cyberiad, one of Lem's most beloved works, follows the exploits of Trurl and Klapaucius—two ingenious...

A genre-defining and redefining collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from all over the globe. VOLUME TWO OF TWO 'A huge, eye-opening, mind-blowing surprise' - Lisa Tuttle, Guardian In The Big Book of Cyberpunk, award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries. Here...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry now comes with collectable new covers featuring Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archival material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. 'The greatest moment of my life is coming up now! I mustn't bish it! I mustn't bosh it!' This beautiful edition of Esio Trot, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, includes...

The definitive collection of stories from one of the most influential science fiction writers ever, and a pioneer of Black speculative fiction. Samuel R. Delany is widely considered to be one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century, and a pioneer of Black and Queer genre fiction. Driftglass, the definitive collection of Delany's science fiction stories, displays...

An outrageous adventure across the stars from the master of witty science fiction. Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, hapless New Yorker Tom Carmody learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help...

This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction, and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In The Tell...

Join Peter Rabbit as he celebrates Benjamin Bunny's birthday by planning a surprise treasure hunt, in this sweet lift-the-flap adventure! It's Benjamin Bunny's birthday and Peter has planned an extra special birthday surprise for his friend! Hop along with Benjamin and Peter to find all the clues hidden in the forest and discover the best birthday present a bunny can...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook and amaze. Gathered in this selection are his very best horror stories, including the gothic tour de force...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 'I'm unfavourable to killin' a man as long as you can git around it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?' The original Great American Novel, an incomparable adventure story and a...

An adorable Easter touch and feel book from Peter Rabbit. Happy Easter from Peter Rabbit! Join Peter on an Easter adventure in this charming touch and feel book. With tactile elements on every page and a simple story to follow, this board book is perfect for little bunnies at Easter. Look out for other Peter Rabbit books at Easter: A...

Wild Places is a gorgeous hardback collection of Katherine Mansfield's best stories, selected by her biographer Claire Harman. This beautiful new hardback edition captures Mansfield's most vivid and distinctive tales. Katherine Mansfield was the only writer whom Virginia Woolf envied. She transformed the short story genre with her work, creating stories that are miraculous in their intensity yet seemingly so...

Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman. Yet, she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice...

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the life of Amory Blaine, a young man rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing with an ambition to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, Amory progresses through a series of relationships, ultimately finding himself cast out into the real world.

Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it — Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up, experiencing friendship, love,...

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and '30s. The Ways of White Folks is the celebrated short story collection from the American poet and writer often called the 'Poet Laureate of Harlem'. A black maid forms a close...

A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first time. A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century...

Considered one of Mishima's masterpieces, this novel is a fictionalised version of real events - the torching of a Kyoto temple by a disturbed Buddhist acolyte in 1950. This is Mishima's novel about the pressure of living an idealised life. It tells a fictionalised account of real events - the lonely acolyte who destroyed a famous Kyoto temple. Mizoguchi grows...

The third novel in Mishima's masterful Sea of Fertility tetralogy, The Temple of Dawn showcases Mishima's literary powers in a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business. He is granted an audience with a young Thai princess known as 'Moonlight', an encounter that radically alters the...

A new translation of Simenon's visceral, critically acclaimed classic. And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth. Most people struggle to get by...

Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion, but he also wants to be loved. In The Red Pony, Jody begins to learn about adulthood—its pain, its responsibilities, and its problems—through his acceptance of his father's gifts. First, he is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. The Pearl is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds the Pearl of the world he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and...

One of the finest American novels ever written, Norman Mailer's classic account of the Philippines campaign of WW2. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in...

Le Carre's singular story of a cautious man plunged into recklessness, published in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, carousing artist, and Helen, his nakedly alluring wife. Cassidy,...

Hoban's first book for adults mixes playful fantasy with an insightful meditation on fathers and sons. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz begins with the note, "I have gone to look for a lion." In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this message. However, his...

A searing coming-of-age tale by one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century, set on the island of Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. "This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds." Ana María Matute's 1959 novel, Primera memoria (translated as The Island), is a stifling story of rebellious...

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.” - André Gide Michel had been a blindfolded scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency, and morality. But the freedom from constraints...

The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's glittering Jazz Age masterpiece. Jay Gatsby is a self-made man, famed for his decadent champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island's bright and beautiful, Gatsby longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion. The Great Gatsby is an elegiac and exquisite portrait of the...

A new hardback edition of Fitzgerald's brilliant and most famous novel. The Great Gatsby is the tale of Jay Gatsby, a man who seemingly has everything, yet one thing remains forever beyond his grasp. His glittering parties are the talk of the town, attended by everyone who is anyone. Day and night, his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young...

A brilliant exploration of power and dysfunction in Victorian England Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously...

The First Man offers an incredibly moving account of Camus' poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria, the love of his silent mother, and the remarkable figure of an old schoolteacher who saved him from ignorance. Camus was working on a manuscript version of the book when he was killed in a car accident with his publisher Michel Gallimard. The First Man was...

An introduction to the weird and unsettling world of H.P. Lovecraft, master of horror and pioneer of 'weird fiction'. An introduction to the weird and unsettling world of H.P. Lovecraft, master and pioneer of horror. Between these pages you will find things that lurk, things that scurry in the walls, things that move unseen, things that have learnt to walk...

Raymond Chandler created the fast-talking, trouble-seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family—and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures—is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My...

Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories — The New York Times A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers...

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes- dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

Raunchy, raucous...a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety — The Times Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser,...

A sparklingly ironic comedy of manners set in 60s London. A rediscovered classic by 'the Poet Who Disappeared'. With a new introduction by Stewart Lee 'Should The Bloater be republished? Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic.' - Stewart Lee Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home,...

VINTAGE DECO – Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s – 100 years on. 'We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet' One of the great literary curiosities of the twentieth century, Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on...

Part of the Vintage Classics Austen Series — all six of Jane Austen's major novels, beautifully designed by writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton, and introduced by our finest contemporary writers. Discover Jane Austen's most beloved classic. When Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, she is repelled by his overbearing pride and prejudice towards her family. But the Bennet girls are in...

Vintage Minis bring you the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between. Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must What is the true meaning of power? Are some simply born to it, or can it...

With introductions by Carol Ann Duffy and Valentine Cunningham In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of the party she is to give that evening. In her mind, she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with memories and,...

VINTAGE DECO - Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house, she...

Over 150 years since its first publication, the power of Madame Bovary remains undiminished. Stunningly translated by Adam Thorpe, this edition brings us closer to Flaubert's original. A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE 'A great novel that is also an inexhaustible pleasure to read' - Guardian Emma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy...

Jane Eyre is the inspiring heroine of one of the best-loved British novels of all time. As an orphan, Jane's childhood is not an easy one, but her independence and strength of character keep her going through the miseries inflicted by cruel relatives and a brutal school. However, her biggest challenge is yet to come. Taking a job as a...

Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world. 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...' This is the story of Cassandra, precocious and charming, who begins a journal detailing her life with her bohemian family in a crumbling old castle. On the cusp of adulthood, Cassandra meets the family's...

A beautifully designed series that pays homage to the essential books of the most important and revolutionary Black arts movements in modern history. VINTAGE CLASSICS' HARLEM RENAISSANCE SERIES Celebrating the finest works of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most important Black arts movements in modern history. 'Why did I want to mix mahself up in a white folk's war?...

VINTAGE DECO – Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s – 100 years on. Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood depicts the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer; a gay couple, Peter and...

Vintage Classics first publication of Mitchell's beloved American epic, full of action, drama and memorable characters My dear, I don't give a damn. Margaret Mitchell's page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope...

VINTAGE DECO — Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s — 100 years on. This is a hell of dull talk...How about some of that champagne? Paris in the twenties — Pernod, parties, and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, with an abandoned, sensuous nature that...

Classic Ghost Stories is a Vintage Classics selection of haunting tales by some of the masters of nineteenth-century literature. This collection includes spine-chilling stories by Charles Dickens, M.R. James, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and E. Nesbit. As the winter nights draw in and you settle in front of a cosy fire, it's the perfect time for a dash of...

The gripping, tragic account of Kyiv during the Second World War, based on the author's diaries as a young boy. The powerful rediscovered masterpiece of Kyiv during the Second World War, told by a young boy who saw it all. Read it and weep... Nothing I have read about that barbaric time has been as affecting as this gripping, disturbing...

The first authorised selected collection of the twentieth-century's most influential short story writer. Selected and introduced by Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles—these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room — Anne Enright John Cheever, the "Chekhov of the suburbs," forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature....

After the Banquet, Mishima's 1960 novel, is a portrait of love and marriage in later life, featuring his best female character - the irrepressible Kazu. For years, Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. Then she falls in love. The man is one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, and she renounces her...

Four of George Orwell's most essential books, 1984, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia, are available for the first time in Vintage Classics with a stunning and unexpected new cover look. THE AUTHORITATIVE TEXT "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." The year is 1984. War...

Vintage Minis bring you the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between. "The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility." Is lying simply an uncomfortable truth about life or something to be...

Charles Dickens' stunning novel, which includes some of his most famous and memorable characters—Estella, Miss Havisham and the inimitable Pip. Great Expectations follows Pip's life as an ordinary country boy, whose path seems destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events leads him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. His efforts to become a...

Twenty of the finest science fiction short stories from one of the genre’s greatest writers, Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, and one of the world’s most prolific authors of fiction and non-fiction. Asimov’s short fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a...

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner is an extraordinary re-imagining of historical fiction. The novel explores the tale of a Victorian woman's love for her husband's mistress. The story follows a young English aristocrat who, cut adrift by tragedy, is led by her husband's former mistress deep into the fervour, chaos, and bloodshed of the French revolution. Summer Will...

A private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon, in this brilliant homage to Tabucchi's country, culture and people. In the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds...

An omnibus of all four of the greatest science-fiction novels of H. G. Wells. In the space of less than four years, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published four of the most influential, original, and hair-raising works of science-fiction. In a life of tireless experiment, travelling, and intellectual engagement, Wells was both a leading public figure and one of the great...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, The Song of the Lark is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman. Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado, has a great gift—her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she...

A new translation of a twisting detective novel from the celebrated author of the Maigret series. The Strangers in the House follows Hector Loursat, a lawyer in the small town of Moulins, who has lived as a drunken recluse since his wife left him eighteen years ago. Unmoored from society and estranged from his daughter, he shuts himself away, numbed...

The True Heart is a love story set in Victorian England by one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. Leaving her orphanage at sixteen, Sukey Bond finds employment as a servant in the remote New Easter Farm, deep within the Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with simple, gentle Eric, the son of the rector's wife....

A new translation of this haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guilt, part of the Maigret series. A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And hanging was the leitmotif of at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches. On the...

Sweet Thursday reads as a post-war continuation of Cannery Row. Set on the Californian coast, amongst the junk heaps and flop houses of Monterey, the book brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears. From Fauna, who runs the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter, the rich tapestry of...

This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string, or a single match in a world...

Nadja is a Surrealist romance, and has come to be known as a book which defined that movement's attitude towards life. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a magical perspective. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton spins one of the...

One of Sylvia Townsend Warner's best-loved novels—a droll and deeply affecting story of love and disillusionment on a remote tropical island. After three years on the remote tropical island of Fanua, Timothy Fortune, a missionary from London, has made little headway. The islanders show very little interest in Christianity and he has only a single convert—a boy, Lueli. As Mr...

A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age — The New York Times "On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms." Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who...

A PMC reissue of this collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by Michael Hofmann. A reissue of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, this collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection...

Maigret Travels delves into the intriguing circumstances surrounding the attempted suicide of a countess and the mysterious death of a multi-millionaire. Both incidents involve seemingly unrelated individuals, yet they occur in the same hotel. When multi-millionaire David Ward is found dead just hours after the countess's suicide attempt, Maigret suspects a connection between the two cases. The investigation intensifies when...

Maigret Takes a Room sees Maigret take on a complex undercover investigation in the heart of Paris. What he thought he had discovered, in place of the joyful candour that she usually displayed, was an irony which was neither less cheerful nor less childish, but which troubled him... He wondered now if his exultation wasn't down to the fact that...